The New Price To Performance King, The RTX 3070 FE

Not That You Can Buy It Or Anything … Sigh

If … and that is one big if … you can find a Founders Edition for sale today, or a partner board on Thursday then the RTX 3070 is a great deal at US$499.  It is indeed much faster than the US$699 RTX 2080 SUPER and occasionally matches or even slightly beats the 2080Ti.  It is still rather painful to describe a $500 card as mid-range, but that is where we are now, and it is one impressive mid-range card.

Our very own EIC Sebastian Peak has done a review or check out the FPS Review too – both taking a long look at the newest Ampere card, testing a variety of games at 1080p, 1440p and 4K to show exactly how it matches up to the previous generation of NVIDIA GPUs.  In every case the RTX 3070 is significantly better than the RTX 2080 SUPER and in the Control benchmarks it beats the RTX 2080 TI by a fair margin.  You will still struggle a bit to get good framerates at 1440p without reducing the graphics settings a bit, but that was true for the previous generation.  For instance you will see around 45FPS in Microsoft Flight Sim with all graphics settings at their highest values.

While it depends on the game and what you are willing to tolerate in terms of average FPS you can play games at 4K on this card, which is again impressive for this price point.  There is a cost to this performance, in the form of power draw.  The tests at The FPS Review showed the card happily sucking down 373W which makes it a hair less hungry that the RTX 2080 SUPER, though to be fair it eats 100W less than the RTX 3080.

Check out their review for performance details, as well as a discussion about the proper label for this card as they also find it difficult to call a $500 card mid-ranged.  You should also check out the impressive photography in our review, as well as deeper dive into the performance improvements in ray tracing applications here.